Excerpt

Harmony’s UX is broken

This sounds confusing. Because it is. There is no common theme in our messaging to our users, especially on our website, and it’s ultra confusing. A huge indicator is our website — it is recently rebranded to a radical Timeless-driven theme. Starts with DAOs, Community, blue Bored Apes, Metaverse with 8-bit DFK, Zero Knowledge University, 2-Second Finality, Bridging, the blockchain trilemma solved, and the header links route to a combobled set of incoherent content. Our information architecture is too exposed and lack focus.

Our elaborate use of Notion pages is a radical method of turning a note taking platform and turning it into a publication by people with many different writing styles. We lose control on messaging alignment and spend countless kilojoules of energy trying to realign, rather than being able to refocus that energy towards delivering results. I would argue we are at a scale that is bringing us less benefit and are seeing this hurting us from many angles — competitive disadvantage, prolonged digital content trail which might haunt us in the future, a communication narrative nightmare when they’re misunderstood, and zero psychological safety for our staff and contributors.

My hypothesis is Harmony’s UX is broken as seen from the outside in and inside out. Even this article itself is publicly exposed and is an example of how in the future, this narrative could be spun in a negative light purposefully to hurt Harmony’s growth; losing confidence across all audience types from investor, to builders, to users and to future contributors.

The broken UX reflects a mix of identity. We need to align on all fronts.

Start with the End in Mind

What is Harmony’s narrative that can help attract all user segments to onboard onto Harmony and increase its utility? Are we evolving into something that we have yet to be able to comprehend? Maybe if we begin with the end in mind, we can work backwards to see what we need to work on.

This method is proliferated at Amazon using a mechanism called Press Release / Frequently Asked Question or in short, a PR/FAQ. With a PR/FAQ, it helps us work backwards and our minds begin experiencing an amazing journey from a new vantage point.

An example of a PR/FAQ could look like this:

Customer Journey

The User Experience, or more accurately, the Customer Journey, can then be plotted. The scope is huge here but we can simplify things by customer segmentation.

“... and I still, haven’t found, what I’m looking for “ — U2

We have been chasing many angles, and many dreams, and still haven’t found what we’re looking for. We can stick with the radical art styles and color schemes on our website, because it aligns with our identity. But the content and messaging is trying to cover a broad spectrum with call-to-actions that doesn’t start with a utility-driven attraction mentality.

UX in other Chains

In terms of just pure UX, if we were to pick ONE UX entrypoint, it would be websites. Here’s how they look like — all other chains including Ethereum has stayed more on par with a mainstream “professionalism” in look and feel.

• One strong message (title) — one detailed message (subtitle)
• Flow which builds the narrative with Call To Actions

One may argue that a lot of users discover a chain through newsletters, news feeds, blog posts and YouTube videos.

Why Harmony?

We lack enough attractions, a strong reason for people to come onboard to Harmony. There’s no strong pull for users to come over to experience Harmony. Here’s a snapshot of a flow of awareness, basic attraction, followed by deeper engagement

I’d like to point out that there’s a disconnect between our UX messaging and the initial pull. Tangential to what the basic attraction is to come onboard to Harmony — even the Metaverse showing DFK does not reflect what DFK really is — a DEX and NFT marketplace, wrapped in a re-engaging game, with in-game utility of NFTs with product-market fit.

Next Steps

In the next 6-weeks, I’d like to propose having @Giv Parvaneh work with @Darren Lau and @Kelly Tigera and have at least an information architect, to work with designers and web developers to onboard in a short project to complete the overhaul that we started during EthDenver.

I believe we have an opportunity to regain our momentum and boost our community (and new user) confidence by 10x which can hopefully boost utility by 10x as well

Proposal

Here is what I’d like to propose we do:

• Identify all customer segments we’d like to target
• Write out a PR/FAQ for each customer segment
• Narrate each customer segments and spec out their 1-3 basic attractions for each of them
• Re-engage with ecosystem grantees and partners to be aligned in strategy for each segment
• Get 3 Strong Yes’s for each segment definition and strategy
• Begin execution and with a clear roadmap 6-weeks from start

Scope of Work

The scope of work will be comprehhensive

Some examples could be the following, with call-to-actions (CTAs)

1. featuring DFK, Tranquil, Mars Colony [Play Now]
2. show upcoming AAA Games and Game Guilds setup by DAOs [Join Now]
3. show off Timeless wallets with Social and free NFT drops and a Red Packet [Try Now]
4. name the top 10 things to build on Harmony incentivized by grants [Apply Here]
5. bridge over to Harmony and get ONEs plus JEWEL, TRANQ, CLNY airdrops [Get Free Tokens]

We can place is measurement metrics rather easily and start directing users into our website first rather than anywhere else (/someplace). If proven to work, we should invest in bringing all external facing content (blog included) to be streamlined using the same customer journey strategy, themed the same way as it rolls out